I Made Myself Sad Today... On Purpose

So, I'm back. My reasons for leaving for a bit were... I was fighting with a lot of people and it was really depressing me. I just couldn't take one more goddamn fight. So, I stayed pretty quiet for a bit while I sorted through various relationship upheavals and the reality of getting back surgery and being off of work for two months. But let's get to why I'm back today. Let's get to what happened.

So, I didn't really make myself sad "on purpose," more like, I knew that what I was doing was going to lead to a full blown Attack of Sad, but I did it anyway. What I did seems like a seriously dumb thing, but I listened to Johnny Cash's "Hurt" on repeat for like 30 minutes. Like, I was sobbing over making dinner and would start the song over again, and that happened for 30 minutes' worth of music. By the time The Hubby came home, I was almost incoherent.
Now you may be asking yourself a couple of questions: 1) Why the hell did you do that, if you knew it was going to make you cry? and 2) Really? You cried that much over a song? (And Hubby's question, 3) Why don't you turn it off if it makes you this sad, you dork?) I will give a short answer for the second question first, because, basically, to me, if you don't at least tear up at that song, you have a heart of stone and you are dead inside and a stranger to Jesus (kidding about the last part).
The first question is a little more complicated. I have a pretty wide and well documented streak of self-destructiveness in me -- I used to abuse painkillers, I used to cut, I used to do a lot of other stupid shit that was bad for me. Today, I had been flip-flopping in mood all day. I was sad for some friends, I didn't feel really great, and then I walked twice and got dressed and did my makeup and looked AWESOME and went out for a bit, knowing that I was pretty, which is still such a new feeling that it still kind of shocks me to say it. Then, I was making dinner, and I had VH1 on, they were doing the Best Songs of the '00s on, and that kind of thing is nice to have on for background music, etc. while cooking. And they were talking about "Hurt" and Johnny Cash, and I remember my first time hearing that song so vividly that it kind of stopped me in my tracks. When I first heard that song, I was working at a record store in Newport, RI, after having to take some time off from school due to being a suicidal nutjob. I can't remember if it was before or after my major suicide attempt, in September of 2003, which eventually lead to my moving out here to Oklahoma. Now, I want you guys to know, I knew that this song had first been done by Nine Inch Nails but I had not then (nor have I now), heard the original version. I know that's blasphemy to a music-lover, but I just love Cash's version so damn much, it just rips your damn soul out.
But that first line of the song, "I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel," is a good descriptor of what some cutters feel like, what some people who try to drown their pain in other pain are trying to tell themselves. For me, cutting became about control. I wanted to be in control of my pain, so I would hurt myself. But I mentioned my self-destructiveness, I have hurt myself in a lot of ways that weren't inflicted by a razor, although that may be considered the most inexplicable thing I've done. For a lot of things, I think I looked at it as numbing -- I remember saying once when someone suggested I had drank too much that I had not, because I could still feel. And there were a lot of times like that.
I think... I'm still trying to sort out why I made myself sad today. Part of it, I think, was that I may have just needed the release a good cry brings. There have been some major upheavals happening lately, I had surgery, and I may have just needed to let it all out. Maybe I wanted to test myself, to see if I'm really as "healed" and doing better as I've been bragging about. Maybe I just wanted to see if I still feel.
Well, I do. That song brought back every terrible thing I've ever done to myself, every terrible thing I've ever done to others, and made me completely beside myself with grief and worry and guilt and... sincere and utter regret. I know everyone says don't have regrets, but I do. I've made a terrible mess of things on many, many occasions, and those things still weigh on my conscience pretty fucking heavily.
And why didn't I turn it off, when the waterworks and the bad memories started? Well, I guess I have a bit of a martyr complex. Maybe I wanted to punish myself for being happy lately. Maybe I haven't come as far as I thought I have. Maybe I still think that I don't deserve good things.
I don't know. But at least I'm asking the questions, trying to sort this all out. Before I just would have continued sobbing. Before I would have laid down in the kitchen and cried desperately as I wondered what the hell was wrong with me, and that I wanted to go home (as if some magical place that doesn't exist anymore would solve anything). So this process of looking at this stuff logically is a step in the right direction. That's good. Go me.
Now, will someone please come over here and turn this fucking song off?

Pain Makes Me Angry

You know, I'm basically pretty happy with life right now.
I like my job. Me and The Hubby are doing excellent. I love my clothes. I think I'm pretty. I have plans for the future -- a vague one for the career, and a specific one regarding my health, fitness, and general well-being.
But this freaking pain makes me so impatient and grumpy and generally a such a raging bitch, that I wrote a massive email to a friend today, chock full of negativity. Meanwhile, I'm trying to convince him of my woo-woo, flaky belief that if you put positive thoughts in the universe, positive stuff will come back to you. Irony, thy name is Erica.
And I've been listening to Crosby, Stills, and Nash almost all day, which makes me feel very mellow. I don't understand why I was such a Negative Nancy in that email. Oh, right, the friggin pain.
Grrr.
So anyway, I'm going to dinner tonight with the in-laws, including sister-in-law, to celebrate my niece's 5th birthday. (And she, by the way, is the absolute cutest being on the planet.) That will cheer me up. I greatly enjoy my in-laws. They're hilarious and sweet and very, very loving.
So that's my Friday night. Hopefully I will be less of an angerball tomorrow.

Emotions Are Weird

When you really think about it, about the weird-ass things that trigger different emotions, they are some bizarre suckers, aren't they?
For example, I started off the day on a good foot. I still hurt a lot, so I wore my brightest, happiest, most-forgiving top and cardigan combination, did my makeup and giggled relentlessly over how much wearing purple eyeshadow and blue mascara makes me happy. Came in to work determined to Get Stuff Done.
I started listening to the podcast of Krissie, Lani, and Jenny together on Reinventing Fabulous, caught up on the podcasts at Popcorn Dialogues, did lots and lots of library work.
And then I was listening to ReFab podcast again and all of a sudden, I got super, super sad. Like all of a sudden the fact that I haven't been in the physical presence of my bestie in ten years caught up to me. And when I hurt this much, it's just a hop, skip, and a jump from reasonable amounts of sad to I Will Die Alone Depression-Ville.
Here's how it works:
"I wish I had friends like these three. They're so awesome. They really are like sisters. That's so awesome. Well, I have Bestie. Bestie's awesome. I haven't seen Bestie in ten years. I'll probably never get to see her. This pain is never going to go away. I'm going to live the rest of my life in pain and on painkillers just to be able to work. And I'll never be able to go out like a normal person, so I'll never have any other friends. And I'll never be able to travel to see Bestie, so eventually she'll get tired of my whining, and I'll lose her. And I'm a raging bitch when I hurt, and I'm going to hurt for forever, so The Hubby will get sick of me and leave me, and I'll be so stressed that he left me that I'll get to the point where I hurt so bad, I can never leave the bed ever, and I'll blow up to one of those people who weigh like 800 pounds, and then I'll really never have friends, because I'll smell from not being able to move, and then I'll die alone, a smelly gross, fat bitch."
See? It's insane, I swear.
And I try to cheer myself up, but when it gets this looney tunes, it's hard to find anything that will work.
So, in twenty minutes, I'll head home and get a hug from The Hubby who will reassure me that he won't leave me if I become a super-bitchy hurty-pants, and I'll believe him... for a minute or two, before the Crazy starts up again.

I'm Not Dead

I've missed the last two days on the blog. On Monday, I felt like hammered dogshit, and yesterday my internet browser and Blogger weren't getting along.
So anyway. I have pain. I have lots of pain. It's like my entire body is covered with bruises, but I don't have any bruises. That's fun. Everything hurts, and it's making me super-bitchy.
I've been eating really well, and I was going to brag about that yesterday. But then my computer spazzed out and I got stressed and went and ate six pieces of cinnamon toast. So, eating really well until I start thinking about how well I've been eating and then I start craving something terrible.
Ugh.
So anyway, that's what's going on. (That and I spent almost twelve hours at work today, so my brain isn't working.) Maybe I'll be more with it tomorrow.

Weekend Musings

I missed posting yesterday. I would feel bad about that but I felt so supremely terrible yesterday that I don't really care.
Friday night, the Hubby and I decided to do some drinking. I needed to pretend that the last week hadn't happened, and he was happy to play along. I had three margaritas, which along with my painkillers made for an interesting little cocktail called "Erica has the alcohol tolerance of a gnat." The Hubby had fifteen beers and we had a blast. We watched a lot of silly stuff, we had some great conversations, and we just laughed and had a good time.
Saturday morning-afternoon-whenever-the-hell-we-decided-to-regain-consciousness, we both felt terrible. We both wound up throwing up and it was just awful. And I feel like someone has systematically beat every part of my body with a sledgehammer. Seriously, everything hurts. I feel bruised everywhere.
Anyway, today has been the grocery shopping, chores around the house day. Chill.
I'm going to go try water walking tomorrow. I've already got a bag all packed of stuff to take to the pool. I will do it. I will, I will.
My mom and I had a conversation recently about me and exercise. I always make these plans and then never follow through with them. I join a gym and never go. Things like that. So, hopefully already having a bag packed for tomorrow will help me get over that hump of "I'm going to do this" to actually accomplish something.
I'm also going to try making a healthier diet happen this week. I've created a very specific menu that is now on my fridge that I want to stick to. The big thing will be seeing if I choose to stick with it even on the days when I'm tired and grumpy and just plain don't want to.
We'll see. But I'm at least trying.

The Political is Personal, and I am Pissed

I had decided that I wasn't going to share this on here. I had decided that this was just a little too personal to put out there. I had decided that the issue was entirely too polarizing for me, that I would hurt any future endeavors I ever tried if I put this story up here.
But today, I just feel like everything's lining up. The planets are aligned a certain way. All the winds are blowing the right direction. Or something. Everywhere I turn, this story is coming up. It's important. It needs to be discussed. And so, here's a note I wrote and published on Facebook. Here's my deepest, darkest secret in the world.

Okay. I'm pissed. I'm seventeen levels beyond pissed. I am so freaking enraged that I could attack someone without much of a second thought, and I am not a violent person, typically.
But this has gotten out of hand.
Yesterday, OK Senate bill 1433, aka the Personhood Act, was passed in the Oklahoma Senate. Only 8 people voted against it. The bill is expected to pass the House. So, basically, now my eggs are people.
Seriously? That's like saying... that my eggs are people. How freaking insane and ludicrous is that? Extremely.
And also yesterday, the GOP prevented a woman from giving testimony about birth control, which lead to an all-male panel. About birth control. For real. Now, I'm not saying that men aren't invested in what happens to women in regards to birth control, but goddammit, they're hardly "qualified" to speak about it -- which is why they refused a female witness. She wasn't qualified. Guess what, assholes, she has a uterus, so she's quite a bit more qualified than you are.
It's when we're talking about stuff like this when I do start to perhaps hate men a bit. Because men are so often telling women what to do with their bodies and their fertility, without any knowledge of or experience with what it means to be female. That shit pisses me off.
The thing is, men can walk away at any point in the event of a pregnancy. Would he be a total jackass and a piece of shit and would most men agree with that? Sure. But he can. He can walk away and never look back. That's why women demand so much in terms of child support money, because that's the only way to kind of keep things fair. But even then, it's not really fair. (And some guys get completely shafted in terms of child support, I know. Just roll with me for a bit.) It's still the woman who has to carry the child, give birth, and then make the decision to keep the child, put it up for adoption, whatever. If she chooses to keep and raise the child, then that's her life for the rest of her life. And at any moment, a man can just walk away and leave her stranded. That's why birth control is a woman's issue. Because it is women's lives that are really affected.
Women and children are consistently at the bottom of the economic ladder. The largest demographic below the poverty line is single-parent women and their children. So when people complain about welfare, or other government assistance programs, most of the people that are getting help from those programs are women and children. If you want to get rid of the programs, then you have to make comprehensive sex education a priority everywhere and you have to make birth control accessible to everyone. To everyone. In every neighborhood. You don't like abortions? Then make sure that all women everywhere have access to birth control. And access to birth control that they are in control of, like the pill. Not condoms, because you're still dependent on the man. With the pill, the woman is completely in control.
And while we're on the subject. Let's talk about control. That's what all of this is really about, after all. People can tell me that they're "pro-life" until they are blue in the face, but I will never acknowledge that. I can't. Because it's not about "life," it's about control.
The pro-choice movement is all about giving women complete and total autonomy over her own body. She can give birth as much as she wants. She can never give birth. It is all the individual woman's choice and no one else should have the power to make that decision for her. The "pro-life" or anti-choice movement, is about limiting women's control of their bodies. Some refuse any use of contraceptives. Others say that it's only abortion that's wrong. Others waffle around in the middle and say that they dislike abortion for birth control, but that they think abortion is okay in cases of rape and incest.
There is a very, very long history of women's bodies being used by whoever is in power at the time. For example, both Hitler and Stalin made rules regarding women's fertility. They were on opposite ends of the spectrum -- Hitler wanted all women to give birth to lots of pretty white German boy babies and Stalin wanted women to be basically sterile, and state-sanctioned abortion was a big deal -- but both of them decided that women's fertility were tools for their ideological ends.
And that's bullshit. My body and my fertility and whatever I decide to do with it is not, in any way, something to support an ideology or a government or any belief system whatsoever. My body and my fertility is mine. And I truly, truly believe that until other women make these same kinds of statements, we'll never really be equal.
So, anyway. Why do I care? Because I'm just some smart-assed liberal bitch who hates men?
Nope.
Be wary, the political is about to get personal.
I've talked about my depression and my history of being suicidal in other places. So, you know about that. Well, my freshman year of college (my first college, which shows how special all that was), I got pregnant. It was a bad deal. I was already downing bottles of pills on a fairly regular basis in an attempt to either kill myself or drown myself in chemicals. I was 19 and I'd never heard of Planned Parenthood, and I don't even know if there was one in Wisconsin. I didn't have a lot of money, so some friends from my dorm went around and collected money from the college's Womyn's Group, and I went to Madison and had an abortion. Well, it didn't go quite that smoothly. There was a lot of agonizing. When I first found out, I was stunned. You see, I had fainted. And my boyfriend at the time was really worried that I had a concussion, so he took me to the hospital. I wasn't eating a lot, so we thought that that was what has caused the fainting, but the hospital did a pregnancy test, hooked me up to EKG and we waited. Then a doctor walked in said, "You're pregnant. You need to stop smoking and start taking prenatal vitamins." And he walked out. That was it. He just walked out.
I, of course, lost my goddamn mind. I was screaming. I was crying. I threw my shoes. I started jerking the EKG thingies off of my chest, desperate to just the fuck out of there. My boyfriend at the time hugged me and told me that we'd "do anything you want to do." This is important, because he was uber-Catholic. I walked around like a zombie for a couple of days, completely unable to process what was happening. I had a professor who had discussed her abortion in class (we were reading Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants), and so I went to her and we chain smoked and I looked at it from every angle. There were two things that I knew about myself for certain. 1) I could not ever give up a kid, the second I saw the baby's face I would lose it and not be able to give it up. 2) I was in no way healthy enough to be a parent. I was trying to kill myself almost every week. And so, I went to Madison and had an abortion.
It was terrible. But when it was over, I was so relieved I can't even explain it to you. It was like this gigantic rock had been pressing on me, and then once the procedure was over, the rock exploded into tiny little pieces and I was suddenly free.
And about two weeks later, I was watching an episode of The Cosby Show (random, I know), where this older couple unexpectedly found out they were pregnant and they were so, so happy. And that. That was when the guilt hit.
That was exactly ten years ago. Yep, this is one of the reasons why I hate Valentine's Day.
So anyway, that happened. And for nine years, I've been on and off various medications to keep my crazy under some semblance of control. But I started cutting and did a brief stint in a psych ward. When I look back on the last ten years and see that I am *just now* getting myself under control, that I am *just now* learning how to love myself, I can't say that I made the wrong decision. Do I regret it? Yes. I regret the fact that it happened. But I know that I made the best decision. And so this year, I was finally able to look at the whole thing and say, I think I'm okay with what happened. I did the best I could.
In fact, my crazy has been such a big deal, that it still affects my decisions about my body. About four years ago, I was seeing a therapist who told me that I should probably never have kids. Because with my history of suicidal thoughts, depression, and bipolar disorder, postpartum depression would be an extremely significant risk -- and I don't want to be one of those moms on TV who've drowned their kids. So, I went on Mirena, a 5-year IUD, for my birth control, because no one would have tied the tubes on a 25-year-old. I've got a year left on it, and I need to start really thinking about my future and what I'm willing to risk and what I want to do about having kids.
So, knowing all of this, would anyone sit there and tell me at 19 that no, I had to have that baby? Well, maybe not. Although there are some who may have, just because there are some people who are so dogmatic that they can't see through the rhetoric to any one individual's story. But there are a lot of people who would say that I was justified in making that decision, that yes, abortion was the right choice in that instance.
So here's my point. When you can admit to the fact that there are some circumstances in which abortion makes sense, when that's the best decision to make in a shitty situation, then how can you ever start casting stones? Are you going to sit there and ask each and every woman why she's having the procedure? Who gets to decide who's worthy of one and who's not? I'm sure there are some sanctimonious bastards around who would have no problem being the one to make that kind of judgment call, but I'm sure most of us can see the problem. That no one gets to sit and ask those questions. Because it's not our business. And therefore, maybe we should shut up about who deserves the opportunity to have an abortion and who doesn't, because how do we know what the circumstances really are? How we know who's really *deserving*? And just accept that abortion happens. It's not pretty. It's not nice. But I can guarantee you that it is rarely, if ever, entered into lightly. We've thought about it; we've thought about it long and hard and often and made a decision. That is our right. It is our right to choose what to do with our bodies. It is our right to demand that it's nobody's freaking business what we do with our bodies.
So. If you don't like abortion, and I don't blame you, then please do the responsible thing. Demand that all kids get accurate information about sex and preventing pregnancies. Demand that all women everywhere get access to birth control that they are in control of. Don't start talking to me about how cheap condoms are. Don't start talking to me about how people should be more responsible and shouldn't have sex if they can't handle the consequences. Don't do it. Because you're full of shit. There are men who will not wear a condom. There are men who don't give a shit about consent. If you want to get rid of abortion, then start handing out the Pill, start demanding that all women everywhere have access to it. Start being pro-life and start looking out for the lives that are being lived right this moment.
And, by the way, my eggs are not people.

Roid rage?

So, back when I saw the neurosurgeon's PA, he put me on a steroid to help with my inflammation. An apparently strong steroid.
I have been losing-my-mind angry all freaking day today. Partly that's because a lot of shit has pissed me off, but even still. If someone had said something weird to me, I may have attacked someone. For real.
I've also been eating myself out of house and home, which I didn't realize was happening until I woke up at 2 this morning. To eat. 2 sandwiches. Oh yeah.
So now, I'm all guilty about not eating well, and eating too much, and being blindingly furious at freaking EVERYONE.
Sorry. *forced grin*
Anyway, so yeah. 'Roid rage? Apparently that's a thing.